It’s awards season here at Econsultancy as the entries detailing inspirational case studies from a huge range of companies continue to roll in, and it's still not too late for your team to enter.

The Digitals 2014 are designed to showcase the finest work from the global digital and ecommerce community, but not just from individuals, we want to put the whole team centre stage in order to celebrate and truly reflect the collaborative culture of our industry.

You have till 24 September 2014 to enter, and in order to give you inspiration for your own entry we’ve rounded up some of the best retail case studies we received in 2013.

Ugg is launching a multimedia campaign, promoting its footwear as part of an idealised lifestyle.

Check out the video embedded below to get an idea of the brand position (the ad feels like a sort of gooey Guinness advert crossed with a Lands End catalogue).

With this new campaign afoot (no pun intended), I thought I’d take a look around the brand’s web presence and see how it stacks up.

The conclusion is that there's a lot to improve upon in Ugg's digital strategy. Part of maintaining a premium lifestyle brand is doing digital well. Having said that, no doubt the new campaign, with its well produced videos, will revitalise the brand if given enough media exposure.

Monsoon has launched Swoon, a shoppable monthly magazine for tablets (but also working well on desktop). It's full of products and rich content and was built by Rockabox Studios on the Ceros design platform.

With the prices of Monsoon apparel comparable with Cos – middle to upper high street pricing - and the more artisan pieces pricier still, at more than £300, this feels like a good move.

The image of Monsoon has perhaps slipped in recent years and lost some of its chic or urbanity. I can see this campaign of shoppable magazines as a step towards bringing this firmly back to the brand, which needs to highlight the quality of its clothing, including its hand-embellished pieces.

The launch of a shoppable magazine is in line with many other brands seeking to bring more editorial and clustering to their offerings. Net-A-Porter has launched a mag, M&S has mixed up its website with plenty of content and trailblazers ASOS and TopShop have been doing this for a while.

Picking which online supermarket you prefer to park your trolley in can be based on little more than which supermarket you regularly visit in the real world.

It’s the one you’re used to, the one you’ve got a loyalty card with, it’s also probably the one that’s closest to your home.

We sometimes forget that we needn’t be beholden to such boundaries when we’re shopping online for groceries. We have the whole of the nation’s biggest food retailers to choose from and each has their own particular conveniences.

You’re decision on which ecommerce store to shop with may purely come down to which offers the cheapest products, reasonable delivery charges and the availability of a convenient delivery window.

However if all these things are moot, it may also come down to which offers the best user experience.

This post is not meant to definitively suggest which supermarket out of Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose or Morrisons is the best, it’s just meant to highlight various UX features and tools that make for a great customer experience, features that other ecommerce site designers could learn from.

On August 6 2014, Google announced that it is starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal within the search results.

While on the face of it, this might not seem like big news, it's another instance of Google using its influence to put pressure on websites to conform to what it considers best practice.

Google has said that right now HTTPS is a very lightweight signal which will affect less than 1% of search queries globally, but it has stated that this may change over time as Google encourages all site owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS.

As a result of this, we anticipate that secure and encrypted connections will become the norm for all websites in the future.